Assess Your Audience

Before anything else, you’ll need to answer one major question — who is your audience?

Your audience determines the type of language you’ll use throughout your social media marketing, and can also influence the channels you’ll use.

If you’re targeting an older demographic, for example, you wouldn’t want to put much time into channels like Snapchat, Reddit, or Tik Tok.

To best assess your customer base, formulate a customer persona, or an idealized customer that you hope to reach. Use previous data like age, location, education level, spending habits, and more to influence your persona.

Set Attainable Goals

“I want to go viral!”

Well, unfortunately, so does every other company with social media marketing aspirations.

But how are you planning to get there?

Having high hopes is great. But it isn’t always the most realistic starting point. Instead, take it one step at a time and start small.

Establish a roadmap for your social media strategy, with milestones at the three months, six months, nine months, and one year points.

The milestones should be attainable, measurable goals, e.g. gaining 500 followers or improving click-through rates by 30%. Then, go deeper and come up with ways in which you can achieve these goals.

Knowing what you want from your campaign is key to your success, so don’t overlook your goals.

Create Sharable Content

Companies with success on social media have one thing in common: They share great content on a consistent basis.

Content creation is the bread and butter of social media marketing. Make sure to post content that inspires your audience to take action.

Great content isn’t consumed and discarded, it inspires direct feedback.

Ask questions, give information, or encourage comments. Social media creates a sense of community, so foster that through your content.

Measure Results Often

You have a thorough audience persona, you have attainable goals, and you’ve come up with a great content schedule.

Now comes the scary part — waiting.

Once your marketing plan takes effect, you’ll want to check in with your analytics on a regular basis to make sure you’re on track to meet your goals. The most important metrics are those that align with your goals.

Refer to your data every few days to see which parts of your strategy are going well and which may need some retooling.

The more often you look at your metrics, the more info you’ll have. The more info you have, the better you can tailor your campaign to customer expectations.

Ask For Help if Needed

Social media marketing can be difficult, even for marketing experts. Don’t feel down if you need a bit of outside help to meet your goals.